Staff photo / Brian Yauger. Mineral Ridge’s Sullivan Sandy (1) puts up a layup while being defended by Champion’s Natalie Yako (14) during the Rams’ victory on Wednesday night in Weathersfield.

MINERAL RIDGE — Last season marked the first time in nearly 30 years that the Mineral Ridge Rams girls basketball program was able to put a league championship banner on the wall.

Now, they get to add another.

Coach Amy Harrison has been a part of both runs, first as a player for the 1995 and 1996 seasons, and now for the 2024 and 2025 seasons.

As fun as it was as a player, it doesn’t compare to the feeling of doing it as a coach.

“I love to get to see them have this experience,” Harrison said. “They’re enjoying it, and we’re gonna try and go as far as we can.

“It’s different when you’re playing. You have a different mindset. You’re in it, and you don’t realize until later how exciting it is. Now it’s fun to see your kids get to have that experience.”

At 17-4 after Mineral Ridge took down Champion on Wednesday night, the Rams are gearing up for another postseason run.

Three of those losses came from the 2024 portion of the schedule.

“We’ve had a great season,” Harrison said. “We started out a little slow. Our first game we had pneumonia, and you know how that flu is going around, so we got through that, and we’ve just been pushing right along every day and getting better at something. Everything we work on is a little bit better in our game, and we’re going in a really good direction.”

A big part of that success comes from the senior trio of Ava Hulett, Lily Merolillo and Ava Carkido.

The key has been the team’s bond.

“We do so much stuff outside of our practices and our games, to make us all get together and bond a lot,” Merolillo said.

This is now Harrison’s fourth year at the helm. The dividends are paying off, and it all starts with the seniors.

After starting off with a three-win season as freshmen, they have only helped the program continue to rise.

“This is their senior year, so you have that mindset, and they came to do business,” Harrison said. “(Gianna Gilbert) is always pushing, pushing, pushing. Our sophomores are such a fantastic group. They’ve improved from last year and got a little experience, and now I have a good group of freshmen coming in. They’ve gotten some experience, and they’re just playing really well together.

“It’s starting to mesh. You can see today, there’s not a big gap in certain spots. We can really just kind of keep throwing people in.”

Going by the “Runnin’ Rams” moniker, Mineral Ridge has used its pace and shooting combination to shut down teams.

In Monday’s game against Springfield, the Rams scored 29 points in the fourth quarter to pull away from the Tigers and clinch the league title outright.

“We’re runners,” Harrison said. “We call ourselves the ‘Runnin’ Rams.’ That’s kind of what we’re pushing ourselves to do. If we can out-run and out-push and I think our shooting this year has really all the way around improved. I have a bunch of shooters at any point. I could have three or four girls in double digits, and that’s huge. You could see against Springfield the other night, we started out slow, we weren’t hitting, and then, boom, we started feeling it, and we put up 29 points in the fourth quarter.”

Mineral Ridge closes the regular season tonight against Campbell Memorial.

Now in Division VI, the Rams open their tournament run where their run ended last year, a sectional bracket final. The fifth-seeded Rams host Akron Our Lady of the Elms on Feb. 15.